When I was in high school, I thought school is tragedy, too much to study (even I loved studying), everyday school routines make it really boring for me. I just wished the school should end as soon as possible and my life would be happier when I can choose what to do and when to do it when I finish the school. I thought college would be better.

And actually, when I was in college, I felt the same way: I thought when I graduated and go to work then I would be happy. My happiness was always in the future. After graduating, I think I would be happy when I can escape 9-5 everyday routine. When I leaved my 9-5 job and work on myself, I, again, thought that I would be happy when I earn 1 million dollars. I’m the kind of person whose happiness is always in the future.

I know a lot of people are just like me.

It’s hard to practice happiness

I’m not saying that we should live happily now and not worry about the future. Your life can easily be a tragedy if you don’t invest enough for your future. I think “invest” means “take risk” and not every risk is equal. Your life in future depends a lot of how much risk you take today. People tend to mis-measure risk, the reason is they usually can not define the right scale to measure it.

In some scales, taking no risk means that you take too much risk; stable job means stable risk. Just remember that the would is changing too fast so that biggest companies 20 years ago may be collapsed tomorrow.

For most of people, taking risk is equal to be un-happy.

“Why shouldn’t I be happy today instead of sacrificing too much for ‘uncertainty tomorrow happiness’?” .

Taking risks can also be overcoming difficulties as discussed in this article about DoubleThink

Be Happy Now and Be Happy later

The best way to be happy in your life is to be happy with what you have now fighting for the happiness in the future. Fighting for the happiness in the future means live a life with a clear goal: clear on who you want to be, what will you do, where you will are…

Don’t just fantasize about the future, the next important thing is about what you do now contribute to your future picture. I have been hearing a lot people keeping saying that they work hard now to save money to travel, they love travelling. Except you want to be a tour guide or work in travel business; otherwise, your ultimate goal should not be travelling. You should find something you love to work on, and travelling should be just a bonus reward.

So, it seems simple now:

to be happy later, you have to have a clear goal & plan to get it

to be be happy now, you have to work on something you love and it should lead to the future goal.

Am I making it clear enough?

Life is hard

One of my friends working in investment bank, he’s earning very good money. And this is what he said to me:

“Actually I don’t like my job that much, I’m just trying to save enough money to start my own coffee shop”

Nice sacrifice!

But I’m not sure whether he really likes to run a coffee shop business or he is just dreaming of the coffee shop fantasy [if you has come over here, so you should read that post, too]

Yes, life is hard and you have to make tough choice. Now, look back the title of this post!